You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

A scar tells a story, a very short story about pain, injury, healing—what so much great literature is about. A scar is concise communication. The white hyphen on my wrist from the clasp of my watch tells a story. I don’t have that watch anymore, or the apartment I lived in then, or the person I lived with, but the punctuation—the symbol for connection, yoking one word to another, making a new whole—is still here. The little white line under my son’s chin, an em dash, tells a story. He slipped and fell in the bathtub, only three years old, and as I lifted him from the water I saw his bone, the skin pulled away like pictures in books of seals, whales, the layer of fat under the slick skin. I rocked and sang him to sleep, naked, swaddled in a damp bath towel, one corner held against his chin to stop the bleeding, while we waited for his father to come home from an evening event and drive us to the hospital. The long pink line where my daughter left my body, then my son, tells a story. A door opened, then shut, then opened and shut again. But I have stood ajar since the moment I became a mother.